NEW HAVEN >> Entertainers, entrepreneurs and academics came together Monday to begin a national discussion about dyslexia.

"It is a civil rights issue for our time," Yale President Peter Salovey said at a daylong symposium organized by the Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity.

Guests included singer and actor Harry Belafonte and entrepreneur Daymond John of TV's "Shark Tank." Along with about 200 others at the summit, they announced the formation of a multicultural dyslexia awareness initiative to bring attention to dyslexia in African American and Latino communities.

As co-directors Sally and Bennett Shaywitz of the Yale center explained, dyslexia is an unexpected difficulty in reading, unrelated to intelligence, age or educational background. An estimated 10 million children in the U.S. have dyslexia, and it accounts for some 80 percent of learning disabilities.

Advertisement

"It is, specifically, a problem in decoding language," Sally Shaywitz said. But it's also a paradox, she added, because people with dyslexia often have excellent reasoning skills and vocabularies.

Belafonte is a perfect example. Although he became a highly successful singer, actor and activist, he had trouble reading music and doing class work. School, he said Monday, was a "crucifying" experience.

"Nobody understood what this disorder was," he said. "They just felt I was a misfit."

It wasn't until his late 20s and early 30s that Belafonte discovered there might be a medical reason for how difficult it was for him to master the printed word. The discovery led him to appreciate his own drive to succeed.

"It did something. It made me feel I was being misread and created a certain feistiness in me," Belafonte said.

Bennett Shaywitz said scientific research in the past decade has shown dyslexia has a neural signature.

"For the first time, it's made a hidden disability visible," he said.

Brain imaging research indicates that dyslexic people experience an inefficient functioning of three areas of the brain normally used to process written language.

Unfortunately, Bennett Shaywitz said, there is no single brain image test that can diagnose dyslexia in an individual.

However, there is ample evidence that certain accommodations can be made to allow kids with dyslexia to learn more effectively. Those accommodations include smaller class sizes, individualized teaching that is more oriented to spoken words than written words and a greater awareness among educators about dyslexia.

"Our goal is to translate this into what happens to real people," Sally Shaywitz said.

Businessman and TV star John didn't learn about his dyslexia until he was 39.

His older daughter was having trouble in school, putting words together. This led him to realize his own patterns, such as the way he routinely misreads signs or spells simple words incorrectly.

"It really hit me, when I would be on Twitter or using a BlackBerry," John explained. "People would tell me I spelled something backwards."

Sally Shaywitz listed a number of high achievers who are dyslexic, including Sir Richard Branson, novelist John Irving, investment guru Charles Schwab and Dr. Carol Greider, a 2009 Nobel Prize winner. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has also spoken of his dyslexia.

"We need to be sure that people like Carol Greider get accommodations," Sally Shaywitz said.